Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.
John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous.
Even mushrooms respond to light – I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us.
I have gotten lost all of my life, maybe more than most, and been found every time.
There is flow everywhere in nature – glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly – so how could there not be flow in each of.
You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose – paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.
The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.
This is all that restoration requires most of the time, that one person not give up.
While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don’t have to dress up, for instance, and you can’t hear them boo you right away.
Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I’m on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don’t come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it.
It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.” That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue.
Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.
I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else’s turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.
Niels Bohr wrote, “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.
One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to sart writing is that you start thinking like a writer.
Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment.
Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds – “Yeah, they’re birds now!
Look at us,” he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down’s syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. “That,” he said, “is one cool man.
I suddenly have two stomachs – a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.
I want to hear someone remind me that if I want to have loving feelings, I need to do loving things. I want someone to make me laugh about our shared humanity and cuckooness; I want someone to remind me that laughter is carbonated holiness.